Word to Microsoft

Long ago my father would bring an Apple Macintosh SE all-in-one computer home on the weekends. This was a treat, for it meant I could write silly stories and have the computer voice read them back to me. But Apple's were in the extreme minority then. As time wore on, Apple neared extinction, but Microsoft bailed them out, and Steve Jobs returned to the helm. Slowly (or not so) and surely, Apple has taken command of the device market by building not necessarily the best products, but the simplest and most aesthetically pleasing.

Apple became the cool thing. If you spend a good deal of time in coffee shops, most people are rocking out on a Mac. If you work at or visit a start-up, most people are rocking out on a Mac. What I wonder, though, is when the revolution might turn the other way. Even if not winning the market share, perhaps Microsoft returns to prominence by being archaic and uncool. You know, what wasn't cool, is cool, because it's not cool.

Yes, Microsoft:

Apple Store? Oh no, it's Microsoft...

seems to be emulating Apple:

Thanks for adding the logo, so I know what store it is.

There are further examples that I will neglect, including the Windows OS being modeled on the Mac OS (guess I glossed that one). But they can't be Apple...or can they? Will the hipster go PC? Will it be PC (politically correct) or PC (pretty cool) to have a PC (personal computer)? By the way, a Mac is a PC, as you may well know, before it dropped into colloquialism as being associated with Windows-based machines. Is Microsoft going to go hard?

When computer's were simpler, they created the game I so long loved, Tetris. I still love it, it's just been a while. The news articles published when that game was released are fantastic, and include quotes like this:

Tetris is so simple to learn that you'll know all the rules five minutes after opening the box. But it's so intriguing to play that once you've started you'll be spending many hours in front of the computer screen-so many that you'll begin to wonder if Tetrisisn't really part of a diabolical plot hatched in the Evil Empire to lower worker productivity in the United States.

Well, anyway, that's that.